Devon businessman Drew Ellis is used to bringing together high profile speakers but it turns out he has a tale or two of his own to tell.

The Ashburton-based founder of the Like Minds Festival, which is bringing business leaders from the likes of Lego, LinkedIn and Amazon to Exeter later this month, built his career in digital marketing after a high profile past in the music industry.

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After graduating as a graphic designer, he designed the world famous “Choose Life" range of slogan T-Shirts for Katharine Hamnett in the early 80s and has created album artwork for hundreds of big name artists.

George Michael of Wham wearing the Choose Life t-shirt

And they don’t get much bigger than Pink Floyd.

Drew’s album sleeve and logo design for the band is currently displayed in the V&A as part of its Pink Floyd: Their Mortal Remains exhibition.

The album sleeve artwork for Pink Floyd's A Momentary Lapse of Reason

It is the first international retrospective of one of the world’s most iconic and influential bands.

A founder of Icon Communications, an international creative agency, he was a go-to designer for the music industry, working for anyone who’s anyone from Sir Paul McCartney and Robert Plant to Radiohead.

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Drew said: “Name a band from the 80s and 90s and the chances are I’ve worked with them. It was a moment in time and it was great fun.” he said.

Drew Ellis, founder of wearelikeminds.com, had a high profile career in the music industry, designed album artwork for Pink Floyd

But it was as a young 20-something that he got a call from Pink Floyd’s Dave Gilmour asking to meet, eager for a new logo for the band that had newly reformed after the departure of Roger Waters in 1985 - two years before the release of the album A Momentary Lapse of Reason.

The inside sleeve artwork for Pink Floyd's A Momentary Lapse of Reason

Mr Ellis said: “I was given these weird cryptic directions to this part of London where I was told I would find a door in a long brick wall.

“If when I parked up, I saw a BMW then it meant Dave was there and if not just wait until he arrived.

“When I got there, the car was there, Dave got out and with a really old key, that looked like it would unlock a castle, opened the door in the wall.

“We stepped through this door and it was like stepping into Alice in Wonderland. There were these beautiful Gertrude Jekyll gardens rolling down to the Thames and moored up was his beautiful houseboat, The Astoria.

“The whole of the ground floor was a recording studio. I listened to the album, thought up some ideas for the sleeve and it went from there.

The design involved hundreds of beds on a beach, shot at Saunton Sands in Devon.

Drew said: “Nowadays, that type of thing would be done in photoshop but back then, if you wanted something, you had to make it happen so we took all those beds into the beach for the photograph.”

After it was shot, designed and ready to print, Drew was then summoned on a whirlwind tour to New York and New Jersey to oversee the print run of the artwork before handing it to the band for approval.

It was a crazy adventure that started with a weekend bag packed ready and waiting by his girlfriend on the doorstep with the message to get to Heathrow for the 8pm flight to New York.

A first class upgrade, limo into the heart of the Big Apple and a ticket to see Madonna in New Jersey later and Drew finds himself being met from a plane and chauffeured to meet Pink Floyd in a giant aircraft hangar in Toronto.

Drew said: “Dave came over to greet me and asked if I’d come far.

“I told him that, actually, I’d travelled from Crouch End via New Jersey.

“At one end of the aircraft hangar were all the cables hanging, to suspend an aircraft over the stage for their live shows, and the inflatable pig at the back.

“Dave said that I should stick around as they were doing a sound check and asked what did I want them to play.

“For half an hour I listened to what was essentially a private gig with all the sounds and lighting. I have to say that it really was a magical moment.

“And that was it. I flew back to the UK with the proofs approved. When I told my girlfriend what had happened, she couldn’t believe it. It really was amazing.”

Drew went on to sell his business in 1989 to a UK PLC and re-branded the company as Sonicon now a division of AGI Media Europe.

Four years later, he founded Eyetoeye as one of the world’s first new media agencies to capitalise on the dot.com bubble. Since then, he has launched Wearelikeminds.com, a thought leadership platform, holding events across the world and holding its second event in Exeter on September 29.

He said: “Exeter is kind of ready for an event like this now - it is bursting with talented people, we have a world class university and there is so much energy and ambition in Exeter.

“We should not be competing with Bristol, which is simply looking to London. We have so much more to offer than that.”